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A spelling alphabet (also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them.
Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation, as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order. This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items.
In mathematics, lexicographical order is a means of ordering sequences in a manner analogous to that used to produce alphabetical order. [16] Some computer applications use a version of alphabetical order that can be achieved using a very simple algorithm, based purely on the ASCII or Unicode codes for characters. This may have non-standard ...
As such words become naturalised in English, there is a tendency to drop the diacritics, as has happened with many older borrowings from French, such as hôtel. Words that are still perceived as foreign tend to retain them; for example, the only spelling of soupçon found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses
The longest word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops, a grass genus. However, this is arguably a proper noun. There are several six-letter English words with their letters in alphabetical order, including abhors, almost, begins, biopsy, chimps and chintz. [32]
When the prefix "re-" is added to a monosyllabic word, the word gains currency both as a noun and as a verb. Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing".
Just Words is a word game for one or two players where you scores points by making new words using singularly lettered tiles on a board, bringing you the classic SCRABBLE experience, but with a twist!
English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in the same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English ...